“Yeah, it was fun,” said Wisconsin fan Patti Kendall, her tone dripping with sarcasm,

Kendall, 67, booked a flight out of Madison at 6:40 a.m. Wednesday, but that was delayed three hours, which would have forced her to miss her connection in Chicago.

She scrambled to get a ticket on another airlines and made it to Buffalo at 11:20 a.m.

Her son, Chad, 37, had his own problems.

He left Milwaukee at 7 a.m. with a connecting flight in Baltimore. His plane nearly landed in Buffalo, but the weather forced the pilot to pull up and swing over to Cleveland, where they waited out the storm for a couple hours. He finally made it to Buffalo at around 3 p.m. to join his mother at the Badgers open practice in the KeyBank Center.

“We were destined to get here – one way or another,” Patti Kendall said. “But the Badgers owe us a couple games.”

And, it wasn’t a piece of cake after they arrived here under winter storm warnings, either.

Lake-effect snow off Lake Ontario whipped the Buffalo Niagara region for the first-half of Wednesday.

Bonus flakes topped off Winter Storm Stella’s snowfall with 4.9 more inches, bringing the storm’s total to 19.6 inches at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport.